adamlesser – Gigaomhttp://gigaom.com
The industry leader in emerging technology researchThu, 17 Aug 2017 12:00:16 +0000en-UShourly1What will happen to the smart home hub?http://gigaom.com/2015/02/22/what-will-happen-to-the-smart-home-hub/
http://gigaom.com/2015/02/22/what-will-happen-to-the-smart-home-hub/#commentsSun, 22 Feb 2015 14:00:17 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=916326Last week’s acquisition of UK-based smart home platform provider AlertMe capped off a smart-home acquisition spree that includes Nest picking up Revolv in October and Samsung taking out SmartThings in August. If the last six months have shown the market anything, it’s that a number of leading consumer IT giants, including Google, Samsung, and Apple, plus a utility here and there, feel they need a connected-home platform to stay competitive.

The reasons for this are complex. For hardware providers like Apple, which should launch HomeKit this spring, the reasons relate to needing to keep users’ interaction with the home within the iOS ecosystem in order to maintain competitiveness in mobile. For utilities like British Gas, which picked up AlertMe, there’s an opportunity to engage customers in ways never possible before, which could be important in deregulated and competitive utility markets. And for a hardware design leader like Nest, there’s value in having some of the best home-networking engineers in-house since the company intends to use the Nest thermostat as a springboard on which to build a full platform that plays well with third-party devices.

Just a year ago the smart home market was still a startup, venture-financed one. Now it looks like a market full of players with deep pockets, global sales channels and major brands.

When I caught up with AlertMe’s CEO Mary Turner the evening of the acquisition announcement, she commented that she felt the timing of the deal was right. “It was starting to get quite noisy and there were some very large players with deep pockets entering the fray. The vision [for AlertMe] was to not service one or two million homes but tens of millions of homes globally. To effectively deliver that vision, we felt we needed the firepower to get us into the next stage of development. This is no longer a market for tiny small startups.”

The question going forward is, What happens to the physical hardware hubs in the home? The answer to that question indicates how users will control the smart home. When Nest bought Revolv, it immediately discontinued the attached hardware hub Revolv had built with its seven radios. And AlertMe has always argued that the value of its service is in its software platform, which also powers the Lowe’s Iris hub.

Turner and I looked to a future in which the hardware hub disappears and the “hub stack” is absorbed by another piece of hardware in the home, like a wireless router or a set-top box. Currently the smart home market isn’t big enough to warrant putting additional radios into a router or set top box, but that picture may well be different in two years. There is no shortage of Apple fans, for example, that believe the Apple TV is ripe to absorb the hub stack, and along with HomeKit, act as a control center for the home.

If consolidation of communications protocols follows the absorbing of the hub stack into a more mass-market device that’s in most homes, building out the connected home will get easier and will push the connected home toward the mass market.

Whether it’s Apple, Samsung, or even a utility like British Gas, there’s value in being in control of the software that will control that home. Which may well explain how almost every major hub maker with a solid software platform atop which big IT players could build services got acquired in just six months.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/02/22/what-will-happen-to-the-smart-home-hub/feed/8Declining sensor costs open up new consumer applicationshttp://gigaom.com/2015/01/25/declining-sensor-costs-open-up-new-consumer-applications/
Sun, 25 Jan 2015 14:00:11 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=908917One of the factors in the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT)—the networking of the physical world within existing Internet infrastructure—is the rapid decline in the cost of sensors.

Sensors are critical to IoT. Consider a connected thermostat: Without motion, humidity and temperature sensors, there is no data that algorithms can use to set points tailored to a user’s behavior.

In some cases sensor costs have declined by as much as 100X over the past decade. One of those cases where a startup is attempting to drastically change the economics of sensors is in the area of near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy. If that phrase sounds familiar, it may be because of all the attention SCiO is getting.

Designed and assembled in Israel by startup Consumer Physics, SCiO is an NIR spectrometer for consumers, set to roll out by summer 2015 for $249 per unit. NIR spectrometry detects the spectrum created from shining a light source at a given sample. That light spectrum—a so-called molecular signature—can be used to identify matter.

Typically, NIR spectrometers are found in university research laboratories and can run as much as $50,000. But Consumer Physics sourced hundreds of cheaper components globally and traded some sensitivity and accuracy of the sensor in order to get it to a consumer price point.

While we don’t know the full possibilities for the SCiO, initial applications center around plant hydration, pill analysis, and food. The SCiO can be pointed at a food item in order to notify a user of the calories as well as the protein, carbohydrate, and fat content. (SCiO can actually distinguish Pepsi from Coke.)

I spent some time speaking with Dror Sharon, the co-founder of Consumer Physics. While Sharon is focused on making sure that the initial applications—food, pills, agriculture—are working well and creating a solid user experience, he noted in a moment of candor, “Honestly, just making something a 100 to a 1000X cheaper is pretty cool in itself.”

As we gear up to guide a new IoT focused channel over at Gigaom Research, innovations in sensors are important because as more complex data becomes available, the potential to produce creative applications for that data grows. For SCiO (and other up-and-coming companies), that means paying a lot of attention to its developer community and its SDK because the more engineers that take its data and use it to build promising applications for that data, the better for Consumer Physics.

Creating a warehouse of data on matter and the physical world is a massive project. It also requires developers with expertise beyond coding. With that in mind, Consumer Physics has released an expert-level SDK that allows developers to download spectrum data without noise cancellation in the hopes that they will develop their own algorithms and tailor the data coming out of a SCiO to new and specific applications. Sharon says that almost daily the company is fielding requests for the hardware to be implemented in diverse applications. One smart-home request came from a blender-maker that wants to integrate the sensor so it could provide the nutritional content of a morning shake.

On the horizon, Sharon and I talked about what other-next generation sensors might either significantly decline in cost or be accessible to consumers in the next 5 to 10 years. We discussed ideas ranging from infrared camera sensors to 3D motion sensing to “digital noses,” or sensors capable of analyzing the air to high degrees of sensitivity.

For now, SCiO is an incremental step towards making a research-level sensor available to both consumers and hardware developers. There will be challenges converting the volume of data into consistent and useful results and to effectively creating a machine that can learn and gets more intelligent with time. But dropping the price of the sensor by 200X and making it available to a broad group of developers is a start.

]]>Smart locks: the next smart-home winner?http://gigaom.com/2014/12/28/smart-locks-the-next-smart-home-winner/
http://gigaom.com/2014/12/28/smart-locks-the-next-smart-home-winner/#commentsSun, 28 Dec 2014 14:00:50 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=902326Nest paved the way for the smart home, showing investors that consumers would pay $249 for a next-generation thermostat. Now many are wondering what other connected-home products could become breakout success stories. In 2015, smart locks, and security related products in general, are the most promising.

For a smart-home device to succeed in the consumer market it must be as easy to use compared to its non-connected version and there must be a return for the consumer in terms of cash/energy savings or convenience. If connectivity merely adds complexity, a product’s in trouble.

Connected thermostats have proved a winner based on these criteria. The lock is a technology that has stood the test of time since metal keys and locks first appeared about 900 AD. If we’re truly ready to move beyond their elegant simplicity, we’ll need some clear benefits. Smart locks must make our lives easier.

A number of startups have risen to the challenge, including August, Kevo, Lockitron, Danalock, and Goji, which all have smart locks for sale in the $179 to $299 price range. Jason Johnson, who co-founded August along with designer Yves Behar, noted to me, “We wanted to wait until we felt there was a real problem to solve and not just make another gadget for the home that was kind of cool but you used it for a few months. We wanted to make something that would last for many years. It’s not easy to do. It’s not easy to find a product to do that in the home.”

As I discuss in more depth in my recent Gigaom Research report, smart locks offer attractive benefits: Being able to grant a house guest or a repairman short term access to your home via a smart phone, going for a run without taking your keys, and being able to use a friend’s phone to open your house in case you do the smart lock equivalent of “losing your keys.”

The trick in the smart home, of course, is always moving beyond the early adopter crowd. Right now, products are being developed that include everything from a connected water monitor for your fish tank to a connected toaster. Getting the broader market to pay for connected products is a different story.

I am optimistic about smart locks, partially because it is a very promising market not just in the residential sector but also in hospitality. Consider an Airbnb host who only wants to grant access to her apartment for specific periods of time and who doesn’t want to have to go meet her guest. Now she can just authenticate the guest’s smart phone for a set number of days. Business travelers are another opportunity. Instead of showing up at a conference and seeing a line of 20 people waiting at reception, your phone can check you in and serve as your hotel room key. I could see big chains like Marriott or Hilton integrating this functionality into their apps.

The risks? Like any newish technology there are imperfections. One reviewer complained that if he entered through the garage and walked by the front door, where his August smart lock was installed, it unlocked even though he was inside the house. One of the reasons the Kevo smart lock requires a simple touch sensor to unlock is that its designers felt intent to unlock was important in preventing situations like this. Others have noted that with features that automatically lock the door after it closes, stepping outside without a phone means being locked out of your house. (Of course, this feature can be turned off and, anyway, plenty of traditional locks work this way too.). Still, I think consumers will move past all of these minor glitches as they get accustomed to how the technology works. The technology is also likely to get better as data collected from a couple years of consumer use produces quicker product cycles and improved functionality.

Smart locks have a lot of benefits for consumers, and, longer term, businesses interested in maximizing customer experiences will see value in them. I suspect that will be enough to move smart locks out of the early adopter set.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/12/28/smart-locks-the-next-smart-home-winner/feed/5Can fuel cells find a home in the data center?http://gigaom.com/2014/11/30/can-fuel-cells-find-a-home-in-the-data-center/
http://gigaom.com/2014/11/30/can-fuel-cells-find-a-home-in-the-data-center/#commentsSun, 30 Nov 2014 14:00:29 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=896429A few weeks ago at a ribbon cutting in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Microsoft officially announced that biogas was flowing to fuel cells to power its experimental data center there. The data center is located by the Dry Creek water treatment plant and has direct access to biogas harvested from the facility to power the fuel cells that are in turn powering its data center. The whole system is completely renewable.

“We’re cutting the cord from the electrical grid. That doesn’t mean that we are never going to connect another data center to the electrical grid. The point is now we have another option,” says Microsoft’s Data Center Research Manager Sean James. “It’s also a very clean option.”

Fuel cells have been around for decades and in many ways have been a technology in search of an application and a market. We’ve seen them tested and deployed in transportation, and megawatt scale fuel cell parks are trickling into the utility market. But there are now signs that they may in fact be best suited for data centers.

Data centers are mission critical infrastructure. They cannot afford downtime. Moving to fuel cells allows for grid independence while still maintaining the option to access the grid as backup. In conversations with eBay and fuel cell maker Bloom Energy both have noted to me that the analysis they’ve examined says the natural gas grid is more reliable than the electrical grid.

Is the price right?

But perhaps as important as reliability is cost and future pricing visibility. Utility power prices continue to tick north, slowly but steadily, in most states. Data centers would love to be in greater control of what they pay for power ten or twenty years into the future. Fuel cells mitigate that risk. Yes, natural gas powered fuel cells are still vulnerable to price swings but data center operators can hedge natural gas pricing up to ten years out. And fuel cells take other costs, like electricity transmission and distribution, out of the equation because power is generated on site. (For a deeper analysis of the opportunity for fuel cells in the data center, see my full Gigaom Research report on the topic.)

Fuel cell power is in the neighborhood of 12 to 13 cents per kilowatt-hour right now. That’s still a far cry from dirt cheap 4 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour power in North Carolina and Washington State, where the likes of Apple and Microsoft have gone to locate their data centers. But in regions like the Northeast and California, where electricity prices are much higher, fuel cell costs are competitive. Fuel Cell Energy, the maker of the fuel cells at the Microsoft data center in Wyoming, has said its goal is to get to 9 to 11 cent power in the future.

Fuel cell power is only renewable if the natural gas is biogas, harvested from the likes of dairies and wastewater treatment plants. They are required to flare their natural gas rather than release the potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere. (Fuel cells could also run on the natural gas that is flared during fracking though this would somewhat defeat the sustainability purpose.)

Microsoft’s project is forward looking and an impressive attempt to prove that locating a data center by a source of biogas could create a loop that is carbon neutral. If it helps spawn a new data center market for fuel cells in the process, the likes of Bloom Energy, which has raised over a billion dollars in venture capital, and Fuel Cell Energy, which is slowly inching its way toward profitability, would be thrilled.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/11/30/can-fuel-cells-find-a-home-in-the-data-center/feed/4How the smart home will evolvehttp://gigaom.com/2014/10/27/how-the-smart-home-will-evolve/
http://gigaom.com/2014/10/27/how-the-smart-home-will-evolve/#commentsMon, 27 Oct 2014 13:00:15 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=883251The question on my mind with regards to the smart home these days is the following: Will software be abstracted from hardware? Or put another way, will hardware descriptions and communications protocols move to the software layer?

It’s a question that was debated at last week’s Structure Connect conference and one that has important implications for how quickly the smart home sees mainstream adoption.

Right now we have some very successful point applications in the home. The Nest thermostat and the cloud recording device Dropcam, which is now owned by Nest, are two examples. But smart lighting like Philips Hue or smart door locks from a companies like Kwikset and August will pick up steam over the next few years.

We also have the introduction of some promising platforms from the likes of SmartThings, AlertMe, and Revolv (although Revolv’s platform doesn’t seem to have much of a future after its acquisition by Nest on Friday). These platforms, which Gigaom Research reviewed in its latest Sector Roadmap, often include hardware hubs with multiple radio protocols to enable easy communication with a multitude of smart devices, be they thermostats, lighting, energy management or security. The benefits of platforms is that they deal with device fragmentation and make visualizing the capabilities of the smart home in one governing app possible rather than having to access a different app for every piece of hardware. They also should allow developers to write code and create rules that affect multiple devices.

Source: Gigaom Research

Note that from a larger market perspective, many entrants could morph into smart home platforms and leverage existing hardware in the home. The telcos are certainly interested, evidenced by Time Warner Cable’s Intelligent Home rollout. Many Apple fans still hope that the Apple TV could someday become the hub for the smart home.

Now if we can visualize all the connected devices in our homes in one well designed and resilient mobile platform, we’d be in good shape. But if we want to take things a step further, we’ll need to move software control away from the hardware layer to the application layer, particularly if we’re going to get to the third evolutionary step, which is a software platform that is context aware.

A context aware platform could make autonomous decisions like preheating your home as you’re leaving work. Allowing software control of various hardware resources allows for creative developer solutions like allowing a smoke detector to also flicker a connected lighting system during a fire for extra safety. But to get to this next step it’s much better to just have the hardware capabilities accessible at the intelligence level — the software layer — rather than on the device. In fact, many platforms may wind up in the cloud and we may evolve away from hardware hubs.

Source: Gigaom Research

The creative solutions are larger than I can imagine but whatever they turn out to be, they will rely on open ecosystems for developers where all hardware is accessible. I recently explored the technology principles that should guide the evolution of the smart home in a Gigaom Research report Projecting the technology path to the smart home. This need for open ecosystems creates tension in the market between those companies that may want to completely control all aspects of accessing their device versus the needs of the consumer to have a user experience that makes interacting with multiple home devices easy and engaging.

It’s possible that a few standout home devices might keep us locked in a world where consumers choose to invest in only one or two devices with clear benefits. But I think that’s improbable since the proliferation of home devices will create an opportunity for a strong platform to increase the value of all of those devices by making them easy to manage. But one thing’s clear: to achieve this vision, some degree of device control will need to move to the software layer, which should benefit all creative developers with ideas about how to best to use all of these newly connected hardware resources in the home.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/10/27/how-the-smart-home-will-evolve/feed/2IoT platforms and the product iteration argumenthttp://gigaom.com/2014/09/14/iot-platforms-and-the-product-iteration-argument/
http://gigaom.com/2014/09/14/iot-platforms-and-the-product-iteration-argument/#commentsSun, 14 Sep 2014 12:18:05 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=873037When it comes to the smart home, big names like Nest and Dropcam have gotten most of the attention due to their product success and lucrative acquisition figures. But as impressive as these products have been, there are a multitude of other unknown products ranging from door locks to basic thermostats that require connectivity and back end cloud services.

Stepping into this market niche are a wave of Internet of Things (IoT) platform providers that work with manufacturers to provide both hardware (modules with a processor and a wifi chip) and software services like iOS/Android integration, APIs, and cloud services. While big players like GE and Cisco likely will make a play for this space, particularly on the industrial side, the early startups include Electric Imp, Ayla Networks, Xively and Arrayent.

Sexy air conditioning

It’s a lot less sexy than Nest, but for manufacturers that don’t have internal engineering teams to handle the task of making, for example, a window air conditioning unit smart, finding an IoT platform provider to partner with becomes necessary. This is exactly what happened when the Quirky+GE window unit required connectivity. The companies worked with startup Electric Imp, which recently picked up $15 million in VC. Electric Imp co-founder Hugo Fiennes was an early adviser at Nest.

As I prepare an upcoming research note for Gigaom Research that will examine the nascent IoT platform provider market, I identified six key factors that should inform any manufacturer’s decision on which IoT platform provider to go with. They include cost, hardware form factor, security, end-to-end solution, scalability and analytics. The ability of each startup to deliver on these six factors will determine which companies differentiate themselves in the market.

All of these startups see a significant potential market because their solutions can serve every potential device that requires connectivity. In fact, many are eying the industrial markets, where different requirements like asset tracking and preventative maintenance would greatly improve operations as the cost of adding connectivity declines. In the end, the so-called smart home is an artificial market drawn line in the future physical graph.

And while many IoT platform providers are responding to manufacturers feeling like they need to add value to their products for consumers, there’s another argument being made by the platform providers related to product iteration.

How smart?

There has been some criticism in the smart home regarding whether the added complexity of making devices smart is justified by the benefits of doing so. A thermostat that provides a 20 percent power reduction is a no-brainer. But do you really want connected lighting, or will the age-old flip of the switch be just fine?

Regardless of the value to the consumer of making devices smart, many of these IoT platform providers believe manufacturers will get ancillary benefits related to knowing how their product is being used. And making them connected and aggregating data on product use gives manufacturers greater insight.

“They [manufacturers] have much more of an opportunity to understand how the product is being used, how often it is being used and in what situations it is being used,” Electric Imp’s Tom Sarris noted to me.

Will connectivity make consumer products better by influencing product design? It probably can’t hurt. And for companies that don’t have the likes of Nest’s in house design time, having improved access to data on consumers’ use of their product may have the unintended consequence of subtly changing the culture at manufacturers toward incorporating data on product use into the next product design. Which, in the end, should make the smart home as a whole more user friendly for the consumer.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/09/14/iot-platforms-and-the-product-iteration-argument/feed/6Nest’s Dropcam acquisition shows why the platform is key to Google’s smart home strategyhttp://gigaom.com/2014/06/29/nests-dropcam-acquisition-shows-why-the-platform-is-key-to-googles-smart-home-strategy/
http://gigaom.com/2014/06/29/nests-dropcam-acquisition-shows-why-the-platform-is-key-to-googles-smart-home-strategy/#commentsSun, 29 Jun 2014 13:00:55 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=853972One of the early criticisms of the smart home has been that many connected-device applications, like an indicator that lets you know when your mail has arrived, are novel but don’t likely justify adding more complexity to one’s life.

So it wasn’t surprising to learn that when Nest wanted to acquire another company to add to its smart home vision the first stop was Dropcam. A connected thermostat offers a very clear ROI — reduced energy consumption and a lower power bill. Security has long been discussed as the second point application with the clearest utility for the smart home.

Dropcam allows security monitoring of one’s home or small business with cloud recording. Additionally I think it will continue to find a strong market among parents who want to monitor their baby or make sure that the fence around the pool is shut (I have one friend who likes to periodically see her baby playing at his daycare center during her workday via a live stream).

The question for the smart home now is how to integrate the larger connected home as hundreds of connected devices from washing machines to lighting enter the home. The strategy from the hub makers like Revolv and SmartThings is to create a device with multiple radio protocols that can communicate with a large majority of home devices, controllable from one governing app. Those strategies are evolutionary steps that will make it easier to control what is likely to become a highly fragmented user experience.

As I work on an upcoming five-year technology roadmap for the smart home for a report for Gigaom Research, I often return to the reality that there will be value in controlling the platform through which consumers access home devices. Nest has rolled out an API so that developers can enable Android devices to control Nest hardware and to link Nest hardware with other home devices like a washing machine or a garage door system. Both Nest and Apple’s HomeKit offer methods for bringing more and more devices under control of two dominant consumer mobile operating systems.

If there’s one takeaway from the early proliferation of hubs and APIs for the smart home, it’s that closed, proprietary ecosystems are unlikely to be a hit for consumers because the intrinsic value of the smart home exists in its interoperability. And in the long term vision of a physical graph, developers will be able to access the hardware resources of multiple devices in order to find new and creative software applications for the home. The physical world will truly be networked.

But until that holy grail materializes, we’ll have competition to build the software and hardware that can absorb lots of different connected devices and produce a compelling user experience that’s easy to operate and produces a clear point application value. Which explains Nest acquiring Dropcam and then offering an API to slowly pull in the home devices that offer incremental value to consumers.

One step at a time.

Adam Lesser is the Cleantech curator for Gigaom Research. He focuses on emerging trends in technology as well as the relationship between hardware development and energy usage.

Opower is due to go public this week, and could raise as much as $110 million from an offering that would give it a valuation of just under a billion. Opower’s success is proof of the capital light approach to cleantech, the triumph of energy efficiency, which won’t transform the source of our energy but will set us on a slow but steady trajectory of reducing fossil fuel use.

The company defines itself as a provider of “cloud-based software to the $2.2 trillion utility industry.” Opower’s growth has been impressive, the type of growth that we tend to only see in software based solutions that can scale rapidly. In 2010 Opower served over a million homes. Last year that figure was up to 32 million with over a 100 billion meter reads analyzed annually. The company has shown the kind of traction and growth that is also difficult to achieve in a world in which the utility is the customer and tends to move slowly, only after numerous pilots.

Sample utility bill with data from Opower

But Wall Street is an unforgiving judge of performance, save for companies like Tesla that have potentially massive addressable markets coupled with game changing technologies. So what does the future look like for Opower?

In terms of total addressable market (TAM), Opower says there are 1300 utilities that it could reach around the world. Given its current customer base that leaves it having hit under ten percent of the market (at the close of 2013 it had 93 customers). Opower opened an office in Singapore last Summer, in addition to its London office, and the company’s ability to convince foreign utilities that its services can save them money and improve customer engagement will be critical to Opower carving out additional market share.

But in terms of truly keeping Wall Street happy, it’s going to come down to cross-selling additional products and services to existing customers. Opower has dipped its toes in these waters with a partnership with 3rd party thermostat makers to offer web and mobile software to help manage and optimize HVAC. These partnerships appear to be slow going.

Honeywell & Opower smart thermstat website

I’m more optimistic about the company’s behavioral demand response product. Currently only 5 percent of residential customers participate in a demand response program but if utilities had an easy and reliable way to reach and control residential power behavior during peak events, by leveraging Opower’s analytics and communications tools, that would be a win. Opower is poised here because it already has relationships with utility customers. If it can show utilities that the company can reliably execute behavioral demand response at a discount to what utilities are paying larger commercial customers to turn down their power, the company will be on the right path to showing the type of topline growth it’ll need to excite the Street.

Opower reported in its S-1 that at the end of 2013, 16 percent of its customers had licensed more than one service. Being able to up that figure will be key to growth because right now the company is pouring money into sales and marketing. While it did $89 million in revenue last year, it spent $30.5 on sales and marketing, its largest expense. Fortunately R&D costs are low for the company–a benefit of digital cleantech–but it’ll need to leverage those sales investments to produce more revenue if it ever wants to become profitable.

The reality is that Opower doesn’t have a ton of competition right now. Yes there are companies like EcoFactor and Nest that are working with utilities to produce energy efficiency and demand response outcomes. And down the road there’s likely to be increasing competition among all these players. But Opower has a headstart right now, having already reached almost a hundred utilities. Now to reaching that other 1200.

]]>What the internet of things means for cleantechhttp://gigaom.com/2013/09/17/what-the-internet-of-things-means-for-cleantech-2/
Tue, 17 Sep 2013 08:42:29 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=690647Declining chipset costs, improving data analytics, and ubiquitous broadband are driving the onslaught of connected devices. Taken together we’re entering the brave new world of the internet of things (IoT), where significant venture capital will flow toward business models that figure out a way to connect a device, mine its data, and provide valuable services to businesses and consumers.

What does this trend mean for cleantech? The ability to connect “things” will result in the possibility of automating decision making in a broad endeavor to drive efficiencies in areas ranging from lighting to home appliances to the smart grid. Almost all of these business models will be broad efficiency plays and carry the advantage of having much less technology risk than other cleantech sectors like next-generation batteries or solar.

If we’ve learned anything over the past couple months about Tesla (s TSLA), it’s that the company is concerned about range anxiety, particularly as it heads into the next couple years in which it’ll try to make a splash in the mass market. It opened the summer by demoing battery swapping technology in the Model S and most recently has aggressively pursued those with access to retail and commercial parking space in a quest to put 98 percent of U.S. drivers within range of a supercharger by the end of 2015.

Tesla is willing to foot the entire $100,000 to $175,000 bill of installing superchargers in public venues. The prospective “supercharger hosts” don’t have to do much. Tesla covers the costs, including electricity, construction and ongoing maintenance. All the real estate provider has to do is agree to allocate half the spots to Tesla only supercharging and the other half to all EVs. Presumably the hosts, which might be upscale restaurants or fancy malls, get the benefit of having Tesla owners accessing their services while they wait for their Model S to charge.

Tesla’s strong moves in not waiting for a charging network to materialize but instead creating an expansive one itself, points to an unprecedented trends in the automotive space. Tesla is an automaker that isn’t just producing a car but is involved in supplying energy to make that car go, a much more fully integrated enterprise.

Now that’s all well and good for Tesla, but what about the entire EV landscape? Tesla’s supercharger utilizes a proprietary plug, and although the stations its planning to build will have four to six EV spots servicing any vehicle, four will be dedicated to Tesla. Imagine going to the gas station, and four of the pumps were reserved for BMWs. When the automakers get a say in the powering of their EVs, they are choosing to create closed systems that exclude their competition.

Tesla isn’t the only one taking a proprietary approach. There’s been a long brewing conflict between the Japanese and American/European automakers about which plug to use for fast charging. It’s unresolved and we’re about to see a betamax vs. VHS showdown as the Japanese automakers have adopted CHAdeMO plugs while the likes of GM will use the SAE combo coupler. In a sign of how crazy this will get, the largest independent owner of charging stations Car Charging Group will install 48 CHAdeMO fast chargers in various cities by year end only to subsequently switch support to the SAE combo coupler.

I’ve never been a fan of proprietary plugs nor the land grab that is likely to occur among charging network startups. The consumer will lose here as will the overall EV industry as the world will get less convenient for road tripping EV drivers in need of a charge as drivers search for a station with their plug type. That will make it harder to sell EVs. Tesla’s recent moves to build out its own supercharging network is one more example of this trend.

Tesla’s behavior overall reminds me a lot of Apple in its attempt to create a closed ecosystem. While I suspect Tesla felt its designs and engineering were better than any fast charging standards out there, I also think the company liked being in control of its brand at every step of the way, including the charging one.

In the end what we need is a cost effective, easy to use charging system for all EV owners, particularly with fast charging because it can unlock the ability of EV owners to take roadtrips and hence address a major range anxiety concern. What we’re getting is a decade of standards fighting over the best fast charging plug and an inherently less convenient system for the consumer, which will damper the prospects of overall EV sales growth.